30.06.2004

Someday I'll be dead
For a thousand years
And someday you'll be dead
For a thousand years
Isn't that strange?
But I got a good night's sleep
And I feel fine

Someday this day
Will be a thousand years in the past
All that will remain
Will be mysterious fragments
Maybe this poem
Will be one of them
Probably not
But just in case ...

Patrick Kavanagh
Was glad to record
His melancholy
For One Who Will Come After
When he heard birds sing
One morning
(I assume it was morning
And just like this one
Gray and cool &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp quiet)
High in the wet trees

I'm glad too
To record
For that same Future Person
The wonderful taste of this tea
Have a sip via my poem
O Future Person
It's herbal
No caffeine!

(What did you think?
Some old dead guy
From a thousand years ago
Had something important to say?
How could he
With his unengineered heart
And his tiny unmodified brain?)

The stone spoke and said
What could be better than me?
Don't talk of eagles said the stone
Eagles build their house upon
And here it paused a moment for effect
Me
Don't talk of umbrellas either
When it's windy
Umbrellas turn inside out
Have you ever seen a stone
Turn inside out
Just because of a little breeze?
The Form of all that lives and dies
(Another pause
This was a most dramatic stone)
Grass
Grows from me
But what of words I asked?
The stone closed its eyes
When they reopened they were sad
Let me go now said the stone
So I threw it as far as I could
And now it rests
Rocked in the chair of the sea
I stood by the side of that sea
And watched the trains of waves
Roll to the shore
To unload their foam
And I no longer understood
What death might mean

2. Different Kinds Of Life

A long time ago
I applied for a job
Sending canned goods by train
When asked
Why do you want this job?
I said because I need the money
The conductors of the interview
Led me out of the building
Past the potted plants
Shaking their heads sadly
Well can I be a brakeman?
I cried
Farewell they replied
That's why I took up the cello
And now audiences everywhere
Stand upon their chairs
To cheer me
When they can't clap loudly enough
With their hands
They pound their sides

3. The Mystery Game

Chairs broken
Chairs overturned
Coat of arms
Dangling from the wall
By a few thin wires
The victim's friends
Muttering to themselves
And adding to the almost
Unutterable horror
Eagles' songs playing softly
On the stereo
Among the friends
Were plants
That much I knew
But how tell which tears
Were real?
Under the burlap
Lay the body
Murder weapon
Still sticking from its side

4. Going To The Museum

In this famous Rousseau
A beautiful woman
Naked on a plush Victorian sofa
Dreams herself a luxuriant forest
Art and sleep &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp sleep and art
Twin conductors to the marvelous
Like Heine's death and morphine
Poor Heine's bed became his coffin, you know
Shall we rest a moment on this bench
Like Bernhard characters
And admire Warhol's
Thousand white thermoses?
So what if some contemporary works
Have been compared to dirty sheets?
What could be more beautiful
Than the detritus of love and sleep?
Free your eyes!
See those brushstrokes?
Look at the date on the painting:
Like the tapping of telegraph keys
The true subject of this Friedrich
Is the wind
Not the blackness of the wanderer's coat
Nor the cliff at his feet
Monet painted many trains
But did he ever paint brakemen?
I'll have to investigate his attitude
To the proletariat

5. Flags Of Different Nations

We make our farewells
Amid sad potted plants
Our forms are stamped
With the unalterable name
Of our unalterable destination
Weeping
Our loved ones turn away
Toward the commuter trains
That will take them back
To their now half-empty homes
We walk sadly up the ramps
And the night is sad, too
O earth! O dreams!
O night! O no one!
Pools - lakes - tears!
My suitcase is full of darkness
Like a manuscript
That can never be completed
I watch the stokers
Climb down to their furnaces
(Are those things called furnaces?)
Impassive as bulls
About to enter the ring
Burn all the chairs, stokers!
Burn all the dreams!
I am completely paralyzed
The little gray flag
Of my new country
Hangs limply by my side

6. Masked Wife Comics

I train and train
So that when death comes at last
My final words will be
"Farewell
O beautiful thighs!"

The moon fears the candlesticks and the candlesticks fear the cinders and the cinders fear the bridge and the bridge fears the monks and the monks fear the silence and the silence fears the white and the white fears the beauty and the beauty fears the silence and the silence fears the cheek and the cheek fears the blood and the blood fears the drops and the drops fear the laurel and the laurel fears the heart and the heart fears the sleep and the sleep fears the love and the love fears the ash and the ash fears the skull and the skull fears the hills and the hills fear the monks

2.

The eyelash fears the darkness and the darkness fears the rain and the rain fears the Christ and the Christ fears the bathers and the bathers fear the river and the river fears the night and the night “night after night waits for you to call”

1.

The sea fears the moon and the moon fears the forehead and the forehead fears the beach and the beach fears the earth and the earth fears the bloodroot and the bloodroot fears the adders and the adders fear the nest and the nest fears the tongue and the tongue fears the branches and the branches fear the herd and the herd fears the eye and the eye fears the pull

He eyes his wife’s legs: 30 years and he still can’t believe his luck
She needles him saying it must be Thursday
I live for this he replies
Perpetual lust pour tu does dogge me at the heeles
It’s your fault &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp you are with many a beauty grac't, and fairly town'd
(I live to visit those towns)
What rose rises
And tigered light falls slantwise through the blinds
And the light rains down
Who was it first wrote I want to scarf your box?
Enough mooning around she says I miss you already
Voice your preference: prone or supine?
At such moments, who cares about the president?
Bell the cat baby one of us shouts
The Ocean shook, and stormy the stars 'gan tremble in ether
Orange we lucky?
Thus we soommer and keepe holydaie
Thus we moth our time away in a well of yellow day

It doesn’t matter what I say
I could say the sun this
I could say the sun that
I could say the same things about overcoats
When I was a boy I wanted to be president of this country
Hold up your hand if wound rhymes with willows
If sound rhymes with wind
I could say cows have crickets
And crickets have nothing up their sleeves
Awake all night in my body
Under a black sun
I didn’t cry I counted my heartbeats
You say white sun I hear white stone
You say black sun I hear black stone
It doesn’t matter if you say door

2.

It doesn’t matter what I say –
Because I was born in this world
I adore you in the moon and spider
When the sky doesn’t calm me
It scares me
Like your eyes like the rain
Like language, in which sails is a verb
And sails is a noun
Yes I adore you in the moon and spider
In ribbons in blood
In the sky that calms and frightens
What good is a roof on our house?
The songs of birds are red and black
And the night is so cold …
Yet I adore you in the net-of-stars-
That-sails-across-the-sky
(The bones of God’s face)
That wheels within wheels
It rocks!
In my adoration
I cross the dark side of the moon
I understand the work of soldiers
I am bound to this dream
I hold it in my helpless hands
And watch it melt like an icicle
The sky that calms and frightens
Has entered my heart
I was born in this world
I adore you in the moon and spider

I’m standing at the corner
Of Blaine and Watkins
Daydreaming
Waiting for the light to change
When a guy rides by on his bike saying
Go back to your own country, man
Get the fuck out of here
I wonder where he thinks I’m from
Probably not Chicago